Canned Goods

As usual there’s all that teaching to be done, but luckily I’ve made it a bit easier this week with students presenting their favorite projects from the semester–and they are, so far, wonderful. Yes, many of the Photoshop and Flash projects may not be the Flashiest, but, as one of my students smartly put it, there are a lot of intangibles that go into the production of a final product. With the work they’ve done, I know they have fulfilled the basic goals of the course:

—to reconsider how we typically define writing,
—better understand the workings of the web, and
—to have some of the technical and social skills that will allow them to produce in a variety of media.

One of the most exciting projects of the semester, in my book, has been their Wikipeida entries. We all learned more about how this community works to collectively construct knowledge.

Also, I’ve been really busy with a few presentations and putting a couple proposals together (when will I get to my prelims?)

Last week I co-taught/led a Writing Center OGE (ongoing ed) workshop on multimodal writing: “It’s Not All Linear Text Anymore: The Least We Should All Know to Help Writing Center Students Compose Multimodal Texts in New Media Landscapes”. I had a great time talking about how/why we work with new kinds of writing in the Writing Center. AND, the process of drafting my ten minute prez helped to prepare me for another talk, this Monday, for the department’s Board of Visitors about how I and my students are using technology for new ways of producing and circulating writing. I have to thank Matt, one of my students, for allowing me to show his research paper-turned blog article. They were very impressed and clearly understood that his remediation of is original text to the blog was essential to achieve his purpose because of its ability to easily embed video. Without him, and the work of my other students, this prez would have left me using new media objects produced by others else where and would have been nowhere near as impressive.

Conference props — the biggie being for Cs, I’m lucky enough to be on a great (proposed) panel with Samantha Blackmon & Alice: “Changing Writing, Alternate Realities: Games and Game Theory in the Writing Classroom.” And I recently submitted to the Writing Across Borders con at UCSB.

In addition to (proposed) self-promotion, the reason I mention these activities is because my experience, I hope, is an example for my students that I can talk about in the classroom: I wrote so much more than ended up in the final products. I easily had 20-30 mins. of material for the BoV prez’s 5 minute slot (ended up going 10, of course, with discussion). This process gave me the opportunity to see what I was thinking and choose from what I felt would be the strongest example for this particular audience.

Now, on to my Computers & Writing paper/prez. I guess I’ll get back to my prelims in June.

Just a link to a video on using WiscCal for those wanting to reserve AV equipment — created by our department tech guru, Kelly Osborn:

WiscWiki 2007

This past Friday I participated in the first WiscWiki Conference which included 20 faculty and IT staff from around the entire UW-System (more were not able come to campus but are involved on the site). Some of the disciplines represented: Communication, English (Comp-Rhet & Lit), LIS, and ESL.

There was a range of experience with wikis represented, but only a few had extensive experience, and surprisingly, I seemed to be one of the more experienced—if not in actual wiki usage, then in knowledge about about wikis. My Wikipedia project will soon be up in the wiki, but basically my students will choose terms we’ve encountered during the semester and write Wikipedia entries for them. There are a few benefits for students (in my mind):

—learn the basics of wiki-markup syntax
—consider the strengths and weaknesses of writing in collaborative spaces
—consider the strengths and weaknesses of Wikipedia, specifically, as a source of information
—consider “objectivity” in encyclopedic writing (see debate 1 and 2 surrounding Wikipedia and creation of Conservapedia & Citizendium)

I’m sure there are more goals I missing, but that’s the point of attending the conference and contributing to WiscWiki—take advantage of collective intelligence.

We began the conference with 5 min intros by those who’ve used wikis. My story was about how there seems to be a fiction regarding ow tech savvy our students are. For example, when I started talking to my students about wikis and using Wikipedia as a resource, I showed them how easy it is to edit many of Wikipedia’s entries. I chose the Web 2.0 entry and changed the first sentence to read that I had coined the term rather than O’Reilly media.

The general reaction is difficult to describe, but shock wouldn’t be far from what I saw. Even students who had heard about Wikipedia being editable, they hadn’t really thought about what that meant—how easy it is to do. So, in my attempts to give students the knowledge and skills to navigate the new media landscape, it seems appropriate and important to give students opportunities to compose in these spaces—to see how it works from the position of producers rather than consumers.

More about the conference:
Wiki hosting: basically, in the UW-System, establishing wikis is a grassroots effort. Those with the tech proficiencies can create, maintain, and host wikis. I was lucky enough to make contact with people supporting the use of Moodle for course management (it uses erfurtwiki) and take the time to help a noob set it up. One example is Matt Livesey’s advisement wiki at UW-Stout; he set it up and maintains it, but it isn’t a part of the University (fear, lack of control are factors). Also, once a university or system decides to support a wiki platform, there needs to be a service model & service team ($$$$)

Risks of free collaboration wikis:
–student work getting changed
–student privacy concerns (FERPA)
–vandalism
–spambots
–protecting the university’s rep

Some steps to take:
–Using MediaWiki may be the best platform option in that that is what Wikipedia uses, and they frequently update the software.
–demonstrate to administration how wikis solve problems that cannot be solved any other way

There was more that happened that I think is best left to be developed on WiscWiki (for the sake of space here and efficiency [my time—prelims, con paper/proposals are calling]).

I’ll end with touching on the session I moderated: authorship models. Here are some of the questions we discussed:

—In terms of authorship, do wikis do something new, different than the ways in which knowledge is constructed elsewhere? Or do wikis simply model what’s already happening but in a more public space?
—What authorship models work the best in particular situations? (Inside and outside the classroom // wiki-based and non-wiki-based)
—Why do they work, in each locale or situation?
—What are the similarities and differences between outside-of-school (workplace or community) authorship models and in-school models?
—Is any text ever single-authored? How can we talk about similarities and differences in authorship models with our students?
—How do collaboration models in f2f or e-spaces allow different personality types to participate? (we talked about “shy” students and diminishing effects of being judged [I’m not sure how judgment by others changes in e-spaces])
—What makes a collaborative group well?

One of my reservations when talking about any school assignment is Where does motivation/fun fit in? I don’t have a complete handle on this, but it seems that fun is what’s missing from the discussion of authorship models. It also bugged me in the community building session: why would anyone want to be a member of a community in a classroom, especially a gen ed required composition course? How is it possible to make community happen in the classroom, if FUN is the essential component? If fun is essential . . .

In my section of EN201, we’ve been talking about intellectual property, copyright, and sampling, and now, we’ll be focusing on Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture in preparation for their research papers on knowledge communities, lovemarking, grassroots creativity and transmedia storytelling. I used Constance Steinkuehler’s “Cognition and Literacy in MMOGs” as a model for research that puts, to quote from Scot’s rhetorical criticism assignment, “theory and artifacts into dialogue with the hope of animating and extending our understanding of both.”

One of my students smartly asked how a MMOG could be educational.

So, since we’re talking about Jenkins’ work, I’ll post part of a talk he gave in Second Life and let him speak to this:

Also, for more info on Second Life, I point you to one of my favorite programs of all time, CBS Sunday Morning.

From the WPA-list, a great resource I recommend to anyone wanting another way to become more familiar the happenings in the field, as posted by Charlie Lowe under “teaching with drupal”.

I’m thinking about this as a project for my next new media and participatory culture course . . .

Last night, after watching the guys get it together on American Idol, K. and I watched Fox’s Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?. Hopefully, in my humble opinion, those advocating for high stakes testing will take step back and re-evaluate their goals . . . if they watch this program.

The APA has a statement on their website calling for the “Appropriate Use of High-Stakes Testing in Our Nation’s Schools,” but I often wonder how large a footprint it can make compared to this new game show? While taking courses over in C&I, I often heard from students in Ed. policy (experienced teachers, too) the argument against this sort of testing: “high-stakes decisions should not be made on the basis of a single test score, because a single test can only provide a “snapshot” of student achievement and may not accurately reflect an entire year’s worth of student progress and achievement” (APA).

Okay. I can see their point, but when watching 5th Grader, I think back to my own school experience and coming to ask (often) questions such as Why am I learning who the first President of the U.S. to be impeached was? Ask any number of other trivia questions and you’d get the same response: “You’ll need this in your future.” Maybe by future they meant college–since I’ve never dealt with any hypotenuses since my undergrad dayze. So, beyond college (more learning and testing and gatekeeping), what else is this knowledge good for?

At this point, I’m not sure how I might go about answering this question for others. However, as I’m working on my prelims reading, I do see how much of what I reading will help me to do the work I hope to do in the future. It’s more than trivia or proving I’m worthy to start a dissertation. For the most part, I am deeply engaged with the texts–as knowledge I feel having true use-value on a number of levels.

But what good is knowing who the first President of the U.S. to be impeached was? Money!

The first contestant was a graduate of UCLA and a lawyer. The kind of middle-class white guy who would be expected to do well. One of the 5th graders even observed that “He looks smart!”

How’d he do? He made it to question 5 but decided to “Drop out” and take the $5000 dollars he had already won. But wait! He didn’t win a single penny because he didn’t answer a single question correctly. The kids gave him the answers–all of them (they were the life-lines).

Here’s the “smart” guy, failing questions that children in 1st thru 5th grade are expected to get correct.

I guess the question is (at least for me) is why do we expect children to hold encyclopedic knowledge that will (only?) serve them well in tests and Jeopardy? Knowledge adults don’t need to retain. Is this how we judge intelligence? Ingesting the forgettable. Is this what we base admission decisions on? Regurgitative competence.

One of my colleagues asked, “Why is it okay to let adults specialize yet expect children to learn everything?”

I was visiting Scot’s class today; they were discussing Hayles’ Writing Machines & Lexia to Perplexia. The conversation got around to Cyborgs–thinking of ourselves as cyborgs. One student gave Star Trek as an example; maybe he was embarrassed to admit it or possibly, he didn’t know they were called the Borg.

A few seconds passed (felt like minutes) before I burst out, enthusiastically, “Robocop.” No response, except for from Scot, who quoted the movie poster: “Part man, part machine, all cop.” It’s possible they don’t know the reference. The movie’s from 1987. 20 years. And most of the students range? 20-22.

About this time last year, Scot and I were showing “The Merchants of Cool” to our EN100 sections, and part of the response from students was how dated the material was to them.

Keeping up with the times is work:

http://blogs.msdn.com/stevecla01/archive/2006/10/22/keeping-up-with-the-times.aspx
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/4161/1/
http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-Update/keeping-up-to-date.html
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4022/is_200311/ai_n9312474
http://qna.live.com/ShowQuestion.aspx?qid=E5314A2561624F80AB3F801C45354355
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/footshooting/IVthe_times.shtml
http://cjournal.concordia.ca/journalarchives/2005-06/mar_9/006445.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/guide/articles/k/keepingupappeara_7773960.shtml
http://www.guitarnoise.com/article.php?id=13
http://www.ahns.info/opinion/docs/cassisi.php
http://chr.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/39/2/247
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/jbp/cat/2004/00000009/00000001/art00004
http://www.springerlink.com/content/fh45w27l20588235/
http://news.com.com/2100-1041_3-6083432.html

Context: the celebration (put emphasis on the word celebration. really emphasize it) of new computer lab. My role: presenting my use of the lab (unexpected role: defender of new media in a composition course). Occurrence: A couple responses, at the end of my prez, to the Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us video and what I’m doing this semester:

Q1: How do you document the students sources in a video like this? It’s a mash of sources. Isn’t this the problem with all this technology?
A1: Ah, the image in the video says Wikipedia, and the next says YouTube . . .
A2: I understand concerns over plagiarism in writing classes, but there are many cases of scholars and professional writers plagiarizing, even if it’s unintentional. Here, the appropriations are intentional and not disguised.
A3: And I’ve found that when I’m writing with a source next to me, I begin to take on that voice. Aren’t all research papers, essentially, a mashup in print form? Tracking what’s plagiarism and what isn’t in print is messy.
A4: Sure, in a writing classroom students should understand issues such as plagiarism, copyright, and appropriation. By actually having students perform these actions with digital media might be a way reaching that understanding in ways that handouts warning students of the ramifications of plagiarism might not.

Q2 ( I don’t think I understood it really): this video was so fast. everything on the web seems fast. Sitting down to write on a piece of paper takes time to do. (seem to be a conflation: the end product is fast? so the process is too?).
A: Students have to consider the affordances of a particular medium, and they spend an incredible amount of time composing in the media we use.

Q3: Not all students have access to the technology you’re using. How do you respond to that?
A1: Well, maybe that’s a good reason to incorporate the technology into the classroom; this computer lab gives everyone in the course an opportunity to work with technology; a student who doesn’t outside the class gets it here.
A2: And those students who are privileged enough to have it already begin to understand the issue of access when it’s discussed in class (costs of software, hardware, high-speed internet connections, to start).
A3: Students not only gain some technical proficiencies but, ideally, they also gain an understanding about privilege, civic engagement, collective intelligence, and personal expression in these new media landscapes.

I definitely didn’t have the best responses prepared, simply because I wasn’t expecting an after-conference paper delivery q&a. So I learned: “Don’t leave home without [them]” (Karl Malden, American Express slogan).

Scot sent the link to this video on one of our listservs–from someone’s blog post. I haven’t had a chance to ask him about it, but since this is perfect for my 201 students to watch, I’ve posted it here.

[ADD: just got word that Jenny originally posted this. Very cool. Do you imagine this sort of project could be a CV line?]

[ADD 2 (feb. 7): “A LESSON IN VIRAL VIDEO
Professor gives his class a real-world demonstration of how to
use often-viewed sites to quickly spread content.
http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/02/07/web” (WPA-List post)]

This semester Thursdays are no longer simply Thursdays; they’re Prelims Thursdays. Actually, that’s a pretty sucky title. But I don’t have time to think of a better one. Got to work on the faculty question: “In what ways is writing organized by circumstance? And how do our answers to that question impact our theories, practices, and pedagogies?”

There are a lot of ways to answer this question, and one way is with a literacy autoethnography–the kind of assignment we sometimes give our students (write about a literacy experience . . . mine usually starts with getting Ds in handwriting). It’s an idea, but I’ve written about some of these experience as reflections in my coursework. I don’t think I’ll end up going that direction. After making the lit review move (with a bunch of Literacy Studies research), I’m hoping to move into new media literacies by pulling out some Gee and the New London Group (situated learning and multiliteracies) so as to focus on the acquisition of Discourse.

One of the other moves I need and want to make is to problematize my own use of new media technology in the classroom. People are learning to work with new media technologies within social networks–Harry Potter fan fiction on Muggle.net, Photoshop image manipulation on Worth1000.com, machinima on Machinima.com. That’s what’s missing from my classroom, situated learning.

As a MA student/TA I made service-learning a part of my FYC curriculum because I wanted students to have real-world (or post-college) rhetorical situations in which to write with non-profit agencies in the community. One of the problems: Even though they had a dozen sites to choose from, they had a dozen sites to choose from. Were they interested in what any of these agencies were doing? On the rare occasion a good match was made (a mother worked with the YMCA because she was concerned that the Y and the community didn’t offer any recreational opportunities or events for teens; the age group of her daughter), there was intrinsic motivation to work on the project, and my deadlines and those of the Y were the extrinsic motivation. But most students were rarely invested in the work/writing they were doing. It was just another assignment.

So what makes these assignments, the Photoshop visual argument or the Flash juxtaposition of word, image, and sound any different? Why am I teaching Photoshop and Flash?

Gee’s differentiation between language and literacy acquisition and learning: “acquisition is good for performance, learning is good for meta-knowledge.” Ah. So my students are gaining meta-knowledge? On the surface my course may seem like software tutorials (a criticism that has been made), but in conjunction with all the readings and discussions we have about language and literacy & new media and networks, the aim of the course isn’t apprenticeship into a Discourse but rather meta-knowledge, which Gee sees as liberatory. Talking about grammar, form and superficialities is good for developing meta-knowledge but not for “getting people to actually acquire Discourses . . . .” Is meta-knowledge the best we can ever hope for in comp? Is that enough?

Maybe we need to talk about the goals we have for our Intermediate Composition courses at the next meeting of the 201 instructors. Are we shooting for acquisition or meta-knowledge? How would our approaches affect our pedagogy?